As it is the first Monday of the month, this week’s Impressions Piece is on Patreon. You can check out a preview below, and if you are interested, you can sign up for my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/meganezombi

Impressions: Misery

To celebrate the month of love, I thought we’d take a look at one of the most famous – if not the most – parasocial relationships in fiction, Misery. Misery is the 1990 Rob Reiner film based on the Stephen King novel. Of all the adaptations of King’s works, this one tends to be rated pretty high, and I certainly get why. It also won Kathy Bates an Oscar for her incredibly compelling performance as Annie Wilkes.

If you haven’t ever seen Misery, first, I highly recommend you do so, but here is a brief overview. James Caan plays novelist Paul Sheldon who feels trapped in his career. He wrote a romance about a woman named Misery and, since its success, has only written follow-ups to it. He is tired of the character and wants to break out. Per his regular routine, he rents a cabin in Colorado to work on his first book outside of the Misery series. When he finishes it, he is involved in a car wreck due to the weather. An unknown person saves him, and later Paul wakes up in the home of Annie Wilkes. She claims to be a nurse and his “number one fan” and that she can help to heal him in her home until she is able to take him to a hospital. He is grateful to her and even lets her start to read his manuscript. Annie presents herself as a nice, clean-cut woman, but the longer Paul is with her, the more the cracks in her personality start to show.

Full piece here: https://www.patreon.com/meganezombi